Michigan

Like Mom used to make: Leah Jean Pratt's recipe for lasagna

View full sizeSam ZomerLeah Jean Pratt, left, and daughter Karen Ferrara with their freshly made dish of lasagna. The recipe is a longtime family favorite.

By Kathy Gibbons

Leah Jean Pratt doesn't have five hungry children clamoring to be fed after school anymore. But those days certainly served as boot camp for the cook she became and the love of food, cooking and sharing it with family that she has modeled for her children.

Pratt, 84, and her daughter, Karen Ferrara, 54, both of Kalamazoo, recently got together to make a favorite family recipe for lasagna. Cooking has always been central in their family. Raising five children, Pratt and her husband of 54 years, David, couldn't have afforded not to have home-cooked meals.

"Our budget allowed for about $30 a week for groceries, and that included everything, so I had to be innovative," Pratt said. "We didn't have crock pots back then, so I would do cheaper cuts of meat, either for stew or slow-cooking type of stuff, and I cooked in volume. To this day, I have a hard time cooking for two."

A retired legal secretary, Pratt worked part time while her children were young. She was always home after school and in the summers. She tried to plan meals in advance and admits it could be a lot of work.

"We didn't have air conditioning or anything, and in the heat of the summer I would be baking fruit pies and cakes and eclairs and doing all kinds of things like that which I would never think about doing in the summertime now," she said. "Let's put it this way, between the laundry and the kids' clothes, it kept me busy."

And like most moms, she had to be smarter than her kids.

"You had to kind of hide stuff that you wanted to keep because you'd plan on (having) something there for tomorrow night's dinner and tomorrow night came and you went looking for it and it wasn't there," she said. "And another thing I would do is mix up a big batch of chocolate chip cookies with the idea of baking them the next day, and my gosh, when I'd go back to the bowl of cookie dough, half of it was gone.

"In later years, when I saw they had cookie dough ice cream with the cookie dough in it, I thought, 'Oh my gosh my kids were way ahead of that.' "

Among her family's favorites were her spaghetti and a former coworker's lasagna recipe that most of her children now make themselves (see recipe below). Ferrara said the lasagna is her favorite, though when it comes to Ferrara's children and the other grandkids, Pratt's mashed potatoes are tops.

"If I'm having a different kind of potato other than mashed, lots of times I'll make the mashed potatoes so the kids are happy," Pratt said, with Ferrara adding, "And they'll make a meal out of just mashed potatoes."

Ferrara said she learned to cook by watching her mother in the kitchen. A few cookbooks are her mainstays, and she enjoys exploring new recipes. Recently, she and her mom took a cooking class together.

And as her parents did with her and her siblings, Ferrara placed a priority on family meals and tried to fit them in around her children's activities while they were growing up.

As her father David said, "Dinnertime, that's what keeps our family together. We have a good time."